UMD sincerely regrets the overwhelming misunderstanding resulting in the #UMDNotAHome social media conversation. The statements on social media connected to this hashtag do not reflect the positions of the university or our leaders' mutual commitment to diversity and inclusion on campus and across our nation.

To put it plainly, the UMD administration stands against hate and bias in all of its forms and wants every Terp to feel welcome, safe and at home at the University of Maryland.

In recent months, there have been instances of intentional provocation by hateful, far-right groups spreading targeted messages that the administration finds despicable. These outside agitators want to divide our campus community into factions that are in conflict with one another from within UMD, rather than see our campus stand together in opposition to the broader forces of hate, white supremacy, anti-immigrant xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia and anti-semitism.

It is understandable that some members of our community are also disturbed by remarks by university officials, even when the comments are quoted entirely out of context and in a manner that misrepresents the meaning. UMD has seen an example of one of our longtime colleagues unfairly criticized for her efforts to provide legal advice to the University Senate Campus Affairs Committee literally at the same time she is working to advance the cause of inclusion.

The administration encourages all members of our community to work together—students, faculty, staff, administrators and alumni—to increase respect, inclusiveness, and cohesiveness on our campus. A comprehensive list of efforts underway by UMD administration is available at umd.edu/umdreflects

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The University of Maryland ranked No. 11 among public universities according to MONEY Magazine’s 2017 list of Best Colleges. UMD ranked No. 20 overall among U.S. institutions.

To calculate rankings, MONEY assessed more than 700 colleges in the U.S. based on three equally-weighted categories, including educational quality, affordability and alumni success. MONEY measured 27 factors within these categories covering areas such as instructor quality, measuring the study-to-faculty ratio, affordability for low-income students and value-added earnings, which measures if the school is launching students to better paying jobs.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The University of Maryland, in collaboration with Rep. John P. Sarbanes and the Big Ten Academic Alliance, recently convened more than 100 people for a Research on the Hill forum focused on strategies to achieve health equity at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. Moderated by Stephen B. Thomas, Ph.D., professor and director of the Maryland Center for Health Equity in the UMD School of Public Health, the panel discussion engaged experts from academia, federal health agencies and the private business sector in a candid conversation about how to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities among vulnerable populations.

“Our exploratory research holds the solutions to many of the most challenging problems of our day,” said UMD Vice President and Chief Research Officer Patrick G. O’Shea, Ph.D. “As a university, it is our mission to create and understand knowledge to develop better ways to house and heal and fuel and feed our people in advanced societies that are just, secure, and free. Achieving health equity touches on the ‘heal’ aspect of that mission.”

The topics ranged from the progress that has been made in access to medical care as a result of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to challenges that still remain in improving quality of care and in making the medical care system incorporate public health and address the social determinants of health that prevent people from acting health promotion and disease prevention recommendations.

“The state of Maryland has embraced the ACA and there is clear evidence that the new incentives are indeed moving hospital systems away from a fee-for-service business model to one that rewards quality care and positive health outcomes over the volume of procedures,” said Thomas. “While the transition is not perfect, our state is a national leader for what the future of health care will look like.”

Panel members shared examples of effective and innovative community-based health interventions and public-private partnerships that are making a difference through culturally-tailored health promotion and disease prevention services, and highlighted the emergence of social determinants of health such as poverty, discrimination and residential segregation as factors that must be overcome.

“I’m convinced that if you address racial and ethnic disparities with respect to the delivery of health care and health care coverage in this country, you will build the best health care system we can possibly have because diversity is our country’s hallmark,” said Congressman Sarbanes, who, as a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has been a tireless advocate for improving healthcare quality and addressing health disparities.

To achieve health equity, researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders must address broader issues beyond the traditional biomedical model and build trust between those who control health care delivery system and those who have lost hope in the system, said members of the panel.

The panelists recommended that health equity be incorporated into all public policies, not just those related to health care, to reduce and ultimately eliminate health disparities.

J. Nadine Gracia, M.D., M.S.C.E., Deputy Assistant Secretary for Minority Health and Director of the Office of Minority Health within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services;

Julia Huggins, President of Cigna Mid-Atlantic;

Kolawole Okuyemi, M.D., MPH, Professor of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Director of the Program in Health Disparities Research and Inaugural Endowed Chair for Health Equity at the University of Minnesota; and

Eliseo Pérez-Stable, M.D., Director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities at the National Institutes of Health.

House Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer, who represents Maryland’s 5th Congressional District and is a distinguished UMD alumnus, also joined the event and emphasized that as an interconnected community, we should all care about health disparities.

“It is unacceptable that in the United States, where all are created equal in the words of our Declaration of Independence, that one’s access to healthcare may be higher or lower as a result of race, gender, or income,” said Congressman Hoyer. “Everybody being healthy is of concern to each and every one of us.”

He discussed how we must continue to defend the patient protections that Americans are benefiting from thanks to the ACA, such as the no-cost access to preventive services like mammograms and immunizations, as well as remind people of the dramatic increase in the number of people, particularly people of color, who now have health coverage as a result.

The event was held as part of the University of Maryland’s Research on the Hill series, which is aimed at raising awareness of research with great societal significance.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – An intervention to connect low-income uninsured and Medicaid patients to a reliable source of primary health care shows promise for reducing avoidable use of hospital emergency departments in Maryland. A University of Maryland School of Public Healthstudy evaluating the results of the intervention was published this week in the May issue of the journal Health Affairs.

For twenty years, use of hospital emergency departments has been on the rise in the United States, particularly among low-income patients who face barriers to accessing health care outside of hospitals, including not having an identifiable primary health care provider. Almost half of emergency room visits are considered “avoidable.” The Emergency Department-Primary Care Connect Initiative of the Primary Care Coalition, which ran from 2009 through 2011, linked low-income uninsured and Medicaid patients to safety-net health clinics.

“Our study found that uninsured patients with chronic health issues – such as those suffering from hypertension, diabetes, asthma, COPD, congestive heart failure, depression or anxiety – relied less on the emergency department after they were linked to a local health clinic for ongoing care,” says Dr. Karoline Mortensen, assistant professor of health services administration at the University of Maryland School of Public Health and senior researcher. “Connecting patients to primary care and expanding the availability of these safety-net clinics could reduce emergency department visits and provide better continuity of care for vulnerable populations.”

Funded by a grant from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the initiative engaged all five of the hospitals operating in Montgomery County, Maryland at the time, and four safety-net clinics serving low-income patients. Using “patient navigators,” individuals trained to help patients find the care they need and can afford, these hospitals referred more than 10,000 low-income, uninsured and Medicaid patients who visited emergency departments to four local primary care clinics, with the goal of encouraging them to establish an ongoing relationship with the clinic and reduce their reliance on costly emergency department care.

Two hospitals in Montgomery County who participated in the intervention continued the program after the initial grant period concluded because of the benefits they saw for patients and for reducing emergency department visits and associated costs. These hospitals are currently testing a new version of the intervention specifically deigned to link emergency department patients with behavioral health conditions to appropriate community-based services.

While hospital administrators and health policy experts throughout the country are recognizing that access to primary care improves continuity of care for patients and reduces avoidable use of emergency departments, the implications of this project are particularly important for hospitals in Maryland, which are now operating under a unique all-payer model for hospital payments. Within this new payment structure, Maryland hospitals will have to meet ambitious spending, quality of care, and population health goals. Reducing avoidable use of emergency departments can help in reaching these goals.

The project provides promise not only for hospitals in Maryland but throughout the nation to improve health care experiences and outcomes for their patients. Shared learning systems were an integral component of the project so participants were learning from each other and sharing best practices throughout the project and that learning has now been documented and can be replicated in other communities.

“This was an incredibly rewarding project to work on,” says Barbara H. Eldridge, Manager of Quality Improvement at the Primary Care Coalition. “We created a learning system that permits us to sustain improved communication between patients and their providers, between hospital discharge planners and community based clinics, and across five hospitals operating in Montgomery County.” The initiative has proven successful in Montgomery County, Maryland and is being replicated in communities in other parts of the country.

“Linking Uninsured Patients Treated In The Emergency Department To Primary Care Shows Some Promise In Maryland” was written by Theresa Y. Kim, Karoline Mortensen, and Barbara Eldridge and published in the journal Health Affairs.

College Park, Md. – Today, the University of Maryland launched a brand-new multimedia news and information portal, UMD Right Now, which provides members of the media and the public with real-time information on the university and its extended community.

UMD Right Now replaces Newsdesk, which previously served as the university’s news hub and central resource for members of the media. The new site is aimed at reaching broader audiences and allows visitors to keep up with the latest Maryland news and events, view photos and videos and connect with the university across all of its social media platforms.

“We designed UMD Right Now to be a comprehensive, vibrant site where visitors can find new and exciting things happening at Maryland,” said Linda Martin, executive director, Web and New Media Strategies. “Through social media, video, photos and news information, we hope to engage visitors and compel the community to explore all that Maryland has to offer.”

The new website, umdrightnow.umd.edu, contains up-to-date news releases and announcements, facts and figures about the university, a searchable database of faculty and staff experts, information highlighting innovation and entrepreneurship at UMD, additional resources for news media and other campus and athletics news.

“UMD RightNow is the place to go to find out all the things happening on and around campus on any given day,” said Crystal Brown, chief communications officer. “This website brings real-time news, events and information right to your fingertips.”

For more information and contact information for the Office of University Communications, please visit umdrightnow.umd.edu.

The NAE cited Pines for “inspirational leadership and contributions to engineering education excellence in the United States.” He joins 21 other Clark School-affiliated faculty who have been inducted into NAE, including UMD Regents Professor C.D. “Dan” Mote Jr., former UMD president and current NAE president. Pines is the second Clark School dean to be elected to NAE. Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and former Dean George Dieter was elected “for contributions to engineering education and materials design and processing” in 1993.

“To be recognized among engineers who I’ve long considered role models is a deeply humbling honor,” said Pines, who has led the engineering school for a decade. “I would not be here without the support of my family, colleagues, and leadership team.”

As dean of the engineering school with over 6,000 students, Pines led the development and implementation of a strategy to improve teaching in fundamental undergraduate courses and raise student retention, achieve success in national and international student competitions, place new emphasis on service learning and grand societal challenges, promote STEM education among high school students, increase the impact of research programs, and expand philanthropic contributions to the school.

Most notably, Pines was instrumental in securing a $219.5 million investment—among the largest gifts ever to a public university—from the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation. Building Together: An Investment for Maryland is funding need-based scholarships campus-wide, as well graduate fellowships, faculty positions, infrastructure, and other initiatives.

Pines’s belief in the value of an inclusive and diverse community has underpinned his work. He served as director of the Alfred P. Sloan Doctoral Scholars Program and the National Graduate Education for Minorities Fellowship Program. The percentage of women and underrepresented minorities in the UMD engineering undergraduate student body has grown to 25 and 16 percent, respectively, during his time as dean. According to Diverse Issues in Higher Education, the Clark School ranks among the top 10 in conferring the most B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees to African-American students.

"This honor adds another well-deserved milestone to Darryll's achievements as an engineer and educator," said University of Maryland President Wallace Loh. "His leadership has infused our engineering program with even greater levels of excellence and innovation. We are delighted by this wonderful news."

Pines is currently leading an initiative to pilot a first-of-its-kind, nationwide, pre-college course on engineering principles and design. The pilot program, Engineering For US All (E4USA), will test the effectiveness of a standardized educational curriculum across multiple states. The course, made possible through a $4 million NSF grant, is intended to eventually provide the equivalent of placement credit for an introductory college course.

Among his many awards are UMD’s 2018 President’s Medal, the State of Maryland House of Delegates Speaker's Medallion in 2015, and various teaching awards, including two Department of Aerospace Broken Propeller awards and the Clark School’s E.Robert Kent Teaching Award for junior faculty.

Pines’s research focuses on structural dynamics, including structural health monitoring and prognosis, smart sensors, and adaptive, morphing, and biologically inspired structures, as well as the guidance, navigation, and control of uninhabited aerospace vehicles at all length scales.

He has published more than 250 technical papers and obtained six patents—U.S. and worldwide—in the areas of smart structures, structural health monitoring, micro air vehicles, navigation, guidance, and control of aerospace systems. Pines has served on numerous technical boards and committees, including the American Association of Engineering Education, the American Helicopter Society, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Society of Mechanical Engineering, and is currently serving as the chair of National Science Foundation’s Engineering Directorate Advisory Committee.

During a leave of absence from UMD from 2003–2006, Pines served as program manager for the Tactical Technology Office and Defense Sciences Office of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). While at DARPA, Pines initiated five new programs primarily related to the development of aerospace technologies, for which he received a Distinguished Service Medal. One program, named the X-ray Navigation (XNAV), involved the use of x-ray pulsars as navigation beacons to enable spacecraft to determine their position without the use of ground assets. Another program, termed the Nano Air Vehicles (NAV) program, served to inspire the current drone revolution and helped to develop enabling technology to achieve autonomous drones weighing less than 50 grams. He also held positions at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Chevron Corporation, and Space Tethers, Inc. At LLNL, Pines worked on the Clementine spacecraft program, which discovered water near the south pole of the moon. A replica of the spacecraft now sits in the National Air and Space Museum.

Pines is a fellow of the Institute of Physics, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and has received a NSF CAREER Award. Pines received a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

NAE membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature" and to "the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education."

Individuals in the newly elected class will be formally inducted during a ceremony at the NAE's annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on October 6, 2019.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Despite decades of innovation in fabrics with high-tech thermal properties that keep marathon runners cool or alpine hikers warm, there has never been a material that changes its insulating properties in response to the environment. Until now.

University of Maryland researchers have created a fabric that can automatically regulate the amount of heat that passes through it depending on conditions. For example, when conditions are warm and moist, such as those of a sweating body on a summer day, the fabric allows infrared radiation (radiant heat) to pass through. When conditions become cooler and drier, the fabric reduces the heat that escapes. Infrared radiation is a primary way the body releases heat and is the focus of this new technology.

“This is the first technology that allows us to dynamically gate [regulate] infrared radiation,” said YuHuang Wang, a UMD professor of chemistry and biochemistry and one of the paper’s corresponding authors.

The researchers created the fabric from specially engineered yarn coated with a conductive metal that allows. Under hot, humid conditions, the strands of yarn compact and activate the coating, which changes the way the fabric interacts with infrared radiation to allows more heat . They refer to the action as “gating” of infrared radiation, which acts as a tunable blind to transmit or block heat.

The base yarn for this new textile is created with fibers made of two different synthetic materials—one absorbs water and the other repels it. The strands are coated with carbon nanotubes, a special class of lightweight, carbon-based, conductive metal. Because materials in the fibers both resist and absorb water, the fibers warp when exposed to humidity such as that surrounding a sweating body. That distortion brings the strands of yarn closer together, which does two things. First, it opens the pores in the fabric. This has a small cooling effect because it allows heat to escape. Second, and most importantly, it modifies the electromagnetic coupling between the carbon nanotubes in the coating.

“You can think of this coupling effect like the bending of a radio antenna to change the wavelength or frequency it resonates with,” Wang said. “It’s a very simplified way to think of it, but imagine bringing two antennae close together to regulate the kind of electromagnetic wave they pick up. When the fibers are brought closer together, the radiation they interact with changes. In clothing, that means the fabric interacts with the heat radiating from the human body.”

Depending on the tuning, the fabric either blocks infrared radiation or allows it to pass through. The reaction is almost instant, so before people realize they’re getting hot, the garment could already be cooling them down. On the flip side, as a body cools down, the dynamic gating mechanism works in reverse to trap in heat.

“The human body is a perfect radiator. It gives off heat quickly,” said Min Ouyang, a professor of physics at UMD and the paper’s other corresponding author. “For all of history, the only way to regulate the radiator has been to take clothes off or put clothes on. But this fabric is a true bidirectional regulator.”

According to the Science paper, this is first textile shown to be able to regulate heat exchange with the environment.

“This pioneering work provides an exciting new switchable characteristic for comfort-adjusting clothing,” said Ray Baughman, a professor of chemistry at the University of Texas who was not involved in the study. “Textiles were known that increase porosity in response to sweat or increasing temperature, as well as textiles that transmit the infrared radiation associated with body temperatures. However, no one before had found a way to switch both the porosity and infrared transparency of a textile so as to provide increased comfort in response to environmental conditions.”

More work is needed before the fabric can be commercialized, but according to the researchers, materials used for the base fiber are readily available and the carbon coating can be easily added during standard dying process.

“I think it’s very exciting to be able to apply this gating phenomenon to the development of a textile that has the ability to improve the functionality of clothing and other fabrics,” Ouyang said.

This work was supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), U.S. Department of Energy, as part of its “Delivering Efficient Local Thermal Amenities (DELTA)” program (Award No. DE-AR0000527). The content of this article does not necessarily reflect the views of this organization.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- The University of Maryland has been named a Best Value College in a new listing released by The Princeton Review. In its ninth year of inclusion, the university is mentioned among other top schools in the country in the 2019 edition of The Best Value Colleges: 200 Schools with Exceptional ROI for Your Tuition Investment.

The colleges and universities included on this list were evaluated overall on three factors: academic reputation, cost to attend and career prospects for graduates. UMD’s high academic rating, career center programming and full suite of merit-based scholarships and demonstrated-need financial aid packages all contribute to the return on investment rating of 89 out of 100. In addition, UMD is highlighted for the diversity of its of student body and proximity to tier-one research and internship opportunities in the nation's Capital.

The comprehensive ranking, formerly known as Colleges that Pay You Back, compiles data from administrative, student and alumni surveys of 650 schools. The Princeton Review assessed over 40 data points in these surveys, including student debt, alumni support, faculty accessibility, acceptance rate and more to assist college prospects and parents.

The full list of Best Value Colleges by the Princeton Review is here: go.umd.edu/U6f

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – For all their destructive power, most volcanic eruptions are local events. Lava flows tend to reach only a few miles at most, while airborne ash and soot travel a little further. But occasionally, larger eruptions can launch particles into the stratosphere, more than 6 miles above Earth’s surface. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines—the world’s largest eruption in the past 100 years—is a prime example of a stratospheric eruption.

When volcanic particles reach the stratosphere they stay aloft for a long time, reflecting sunlight and temporarily cooling the planet. By understanding the history of these big eruptions, researchers can begin to place short cooling episodes and other discrete climate events into the context of large-scale climate patterns.

Researchers working at the University of Maryland, the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, the Ecole Normale Supérieure in France and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have devised a new, more accurate system for identifying large stratospheric eruptions recorded in the layers of Antarctic ice cores.

Using their method, the researchers have made some important revisions to the known history of big eruptions—correcting the record on several misidentified events while discovering a few as-yet unknown stratospheric eruptions. The researchers described their approach, which identifies volcanically-sourced sulfate molecules with a specific chemical signature, in a paper published January 28, 2019, in the journal Nature Communications.

“I find it very exciting that we are able to use chemical signals to build a highly accurate record of large, climate-relevant, stratospheric eruptions,” said James Farquhar, a professor of geology at UMD and a co-author of the research paper. “This historical record will be highly useful for climate scientists seeking to understand the role of large eruptions in climate oscillations. But there is also the basic marvel of reading a chemical fingerprint that is left behind in ice.”

Eventually, volcanic particles do fall from the stratosphere, settling on the ground below. When they land on snow, the particles are soon covered by more snow that gets compacted into ice. This preserves a record of the eruption that survives until the ice melts. Researchers can drill and retrieve ice cores in places like Antarctica and Greenland, revealing eruption records that can stretch back several thousand years.

Because particles from large stratospheric eruptions can spread across the globe before falling to the ground, previous methods to identified stratospheric eruptions by looking for sulfate particle layers in ice from both hemispheres—usually from Antarctica and Greenland. If the same layers of sulfate showed up in both cores, deposited at the same time in Earth’s history, researchers would conclude that the particles came from the same large, stratospheric eruption.

“But for eruptions that are intense enough to inject material into the stratosphere, there is a telltale signature in the sulfur isotope ratios of sulfate preserved in ancient ice layers,” explained Farquhar, who also has an appointment at UMD’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center. “By instead focusing on this distinct sulfur isotope signature, our new method yielded some surprising and useful results. We found that prior reconstructions missed some stratospheric events and falsely identified others.”

Lead author of the study Elsa Gautier, of the Université Grenoble Alpes, did a significant portion of the analyses at UMD while on a Fulbright Fellowship to work with Farquhar in 2013. Following Gautier’s lead, the researchers developed their method using ice cores collected at a remote site in Antarctica called Dome C. One of the highest points on the Antarctic ice sheet, Dome C is home to ice layers that stretch back nearly 50,000 years.

Gautier and her colleague Joel Savarino, also at Université Grenoble Alpes, collected ice cores at Dome C that contain records stretching back roughly 2600 years, covering a large portion of recorded human history.

The researchers used their method to confirm that many events had indeed been properly identified by the older method of matching up corresponding sulfate layers in ice cores from both hemispheres. But some events, formerly thought to be big stratospheric eruptions, did not have the telltale sulfur isotope signature in their sulfate layers. Instead, the researchers concluded, these layers must have been deposited by two or more smaller volcanoes that erupted at about the same time at high latitudes in both hemispheres.

The researchers also found some big stratospheric events that do contain the isotope signature, but were somehow constrained to the Southern Hemisphere.

“This is a strength of our approach, because these events would have a climate impact but are missed by other methods,” Farquhar said. “We have made a significant improvement to the reconstruction of large stratospheric eruptions that occurred over the past 2600 years. This is critically important for understanding the role of volcanic eruptions on climate and possibly for understanding certain events in human history, such as widespread famines. It can also help to inform future climate models that will take large volcanic events into account.”

The research paper, “2600 years of stratospheric volcanism through sulfate isotopes,” Elsa Gautier, Joel Savarino, J. Hoek, J. Erbland, N. Caillon, S. Hattori, N. Yoshida, E. Albalat, F. Albarede and James Farquhar, was published in the journal Nature Communications on January 28, 2019.

This work was supported by the Institut National des Sciences de l’Univers, the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (Award No. NT09-431976-VOLSOL), Labex OSUG@2020 (Award No. ANR10LABX56), the Institute Polaire Paul-Emile Victor (Award No. SUNITEDC No. 1011), and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Award Nos. 25887025, 16H05884 and 17H06105). The content of this article does not necessarily reflect the views of these organizations.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The United States is considerably “looser” today—more tolerant, open-minded and expressive—than it was 200 years ago, but that trend has resulted in certain societal tradeoffs, finds new joint research from the University of Maryland and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Using a computer science algorithm to map words appearing in the Google News dataset, the research team established lists of words related to rule following (e.g. restrain, prevent, comply) and rule aversion (e.g. allow, freedom, choose). They then tracked how frequently people used these words through an analysis of Google Books—a repository of more than 200 billion books published between 1800 and the present.

Researchers discovered that books contained more rule-aversion words and fewer rule-following words over this time period, suggesting American culture as a whole was loosening the strength of social norms.

“We were excited to see that the linguistic trends we identified in books mirrored other measures we collected on societal shifts,” said Gelfand. “For instance, the number of laws passed by Congress, Supreme Court cases heard, and religiously affiliated individuals dropped significantly between 1800 and 2000, while profanity in television and film increased.”

Researchers then explored the consequences and potential trade-offs, as past research by Gelfand has shown that tight, rule-abiding nations and states tend to have fewer self-control failures—such as drug abuse and alcoholism—but also fewer markers of creativity and openness, like patents, trademarks and artists. Researchers collected data on four yearly measures of societal creativity: feature films produced, patent applications, trademark applications and proportion of unconventional baby names. They also collected data on four yearly measures of societal order: crime rate, number of children in school, adolescent pregnancies and household debt.

Their results showed that years in which people used high levels of rule-aversive language had the highest rates of patent and trademark application, unconventional names and feature film production, but also the highest rates of high-school dropouts, adolescent pregnancies and household debt.

“Our findings demonstrate how changes in culture over time can have far-reaching implications for how people spend their money, generate new ideas and even name their children,” said Jackson. “That’s why it’s important to consider changes in single societies over time to understand how culture shapes behavior and psychology.”

Gelfand has spent two decades researching the tightness and looseness of cultures and recently wrote the book, “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire our World.” However, this marks the first time she has been able to examine how a single culture changes over time.

“It’s important to understand why differences in tightness and looseness arise and its consequences for groups, but we also need to be aware of how it is changing,” Gelfand said. “While the US has loosened over the last 200 years, we weren’t able to look at more recent trends. It may be changing now in the other direction given societal disruptions and the political climate.”

In addition to monitoring future cultural shifts in the United States, the research team hopes to employ methods used in this study to look at changes in other countries.

Along with Gelfand and Jackson, the research team included Sohan De, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at UMD, and UMD alumna Amber Fox (PSYC, ’16) from Uniformed Services University. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Humboldt Foundation.